Military Career
After graduating from secondary school, Bio applied to enter Fourah Bay College in Freetown in 1985 at age 21. However Bio change his mind about college and instead enrolled in the Sierra Leone Armed forces military academy and was deployed for military training as a cadet officer at the Benguema Military Training Academy in Benguema, a town in the Western Area, just outside Freetown. He was directly under the command of Major Fallah Sewa, who was head of cadet trainings at the military academy.
Bio graduated from the Military academy as a Second Lieutenant in the Sierra Leone Army in October 1987 at age 22. His first posting as a soldier was at the Lungi Garrison in Lungi, Port Loko District in 1987. Bio was later sent to Kambia District as part of the Economic Emergency Unit, created by President Joseph Saidu Momoh to combat the deepening meltdown and criminality across Sierra Leone. In 1988, Bio was re-posted at Lungi to be trained by United Nations forces in aviation security. After the training, Bio was posted to Benguema as a platoon commander.
In 1990, the Sierra Leone Government sent to Liberia as a member of ECOMOG peacekeeping force to battle the rebels of the Liberian Civil War that was fighting to overthrow the Liberian Government. Bio and several other Sierra Leonean soldiers, including Captain Valentine Strasser, and Seargon Solomon Musa were deployed to Liberia as part of Sierra Leone’s contribution to ECOMOG. At the time, thousands of Liberians were fleeing to Sierra Leone weekly, exposing the country’s fragile security and adding to the economic hardship.
After a year in Liberia as an ECOMOG soldier, the Sierra Leone Government ordered Bio and several members of Sierra Leonean soldiers serving in Liberia to immediately return to Sierra Leone and report to the army barracks in Daru, Kailahun District as a member of a 600 battalion of soldiers set up by President Momoh in order to squash a rebellion by rebels known as the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) that had just begun in villages in Jaluahun Chiefdom, Kailahun District in Eastern Sierra Leone in March 1991. The soldiers included future NPRC members Seargon Solomon Musa, Captain Valentine Strasser, Lieutenant Sahr Sandy and captain Tom Nyuma.
Read more about this topic: Julius Maada Bio
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